Last night, I finally got around to watching “Living,” a fairly good remake of Akira Kurosawa’s (let’s face it) untouchable classic, “Ikiru” (1952). Bill Nighy plays a tight-buttoned public servant, a hidebound functionary, referred to behind his back by a young coworker as “Mr. Zombie.” (She gets out before she’s worn down on the lathe.) He seems all the world as if he’s stepped from a Magritte painting, though lacking any sense of the surreal. At least until the day he is forced to come to terms with his unremarkable life, frittered away in routine, silently riding the steam railroad back and forth to London to sit in a quiet office behind a heavy desk and dutifully pass the buck in the Public Works Department. It is an existence without drama, without personality, and woefully without consequence. Suddenly, late in the game, he is forced to self-examine and grapple in his understated way (it is, after all, Bill Nighy) with finding meaning and grace in his final months.

The film is gorgeously executed, though perhaps a bit too seductive to successfully reflect the dour world of the bureaucrat. I understand the drama, such that it is, is in transformation. But from the get-go, the workaday is captured so alluringly. Everyone heads off to work impeccably dressed in period costume, filing past spotless, stately architecture and bright double-decker buses. Everything is bathed in sunlight. The film’s titles are self-consciously retro. Dvořák whirls gracefully on the soundtrack. If this is what it’s like to live the life of a cog, sign me up!

To lend further verisimilitude to the enterprise – another exercise in “Masterpiece Theatre porn” guaranteed to titillate fans of “Downton Abbey” – the screenplay is by Merchant-Ivory scribe Kuzuo Ishiguro.

But the real reason I mention the film at all is that in its closing moments, what should well up on the soundtrack, but the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Chalk up another victory for Ralph Vaughan Williams.

“Living” is now available for streaming, if you want to check it out. But watch “Ikiru” first.

PHOTOS: Bill Nighy (left) and Takashi Shimura, in the swing